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Finally, user input is invaluable. There were many cases where a feature that seemed completely natural and beautiful to us was awkward or misleading to other users. This is particularly true when trying to work on a problem whose affected population we have no connection to. It is a great experience to have; most projects one is likely to work one deal with populations at least slightly removed from the programmers, such that it is very useful to know how to approach such a problem.
Hannah Walker
A big part of what I learned from this iterative design process is that you will never make everyone happy. This really bothered me at first, because I am very much a people pleaser. I just want everyone to be happy with the design and our product, so it was hard for me when feedback from users was contradictory.
If I did this project again, I probably would have tried harder to get more users and more feedback because then I could see what feedback was more common among the target audience. That way it would be easier for us to incorporate designs that were more largely appreciated. Another thing I wish we had done differently was decide what our back end was going to be sooner. Although the back end didn’t have a huge impact on our front end, it did make it hard to allocate as much time as I would have liked to the development of the front end towards the end of the project.
Overall, I thought we did a great job. There were some user interface bugs that still needed to be worked out. However, we did a good job of incorporating the feedback we got, and there will always be room for improvement.